The Value Got Buried Under Function

Why naming what you feel isn't just poetic—it's how your brain starts to recognize it.

There is a word I hear more than any other in my coaching practice, and it isn't a diagnosis. It isn't a symptom. It's not even really a feeling.

It's fine.

"How are you doing?" Fine.
"How's the marriage?" Fine.
"How are you, really?" I'm fine.

I know it because I have lived it. Because I have sat across from women who have lived it. Fine is a greeting and a deflection and a door held firmly shut—so often it stops meaning anything at all.

That line opens my novel, Remembering What's Hidden. It also opens most of my coaching sessions, whether the client says the word out loud or not.

The word isn't the problem

Here's what I've come to believe after years of this work: fine isn't a lie. That's what makes it so hard to catch. A woman who says fine isn't usually hiding something dramatic. She's often telling you the most honest thing she has language for in that moment—because the actual thing underneath it never got a name.

I call this the value got buried under function.

Somewhere along the way, a woman starts running her life instead of living it. She becomes excellent at the calendar, the carpool line, the casserole, the crisis management. All of it real. All of it good. None of it, eventually, connected to anything she can feel.

The value—what she actually cares about, wants, needs, grieves, hopes for—doesn't disappear. It just gets buried under everything she's doing to keep the function running.

What happened when one word finally showed up

A few months ago, a beta reader named Pam read an early chapter of Remembering What's Hidden and texted me something I haven't stopped thinking about.

She'd spent three years trying to describe something to her doctor. Bloodwork. Hormones. A friend's antidepressants, tried on her own body just to see. None of it was wrong, exactly. None of it was right either, because nobody—including Pam—had a word for what she was actually feeling.

Then she read one word in the book: flatness.

She told me it was so wild to finally have language for it—that she realized, reading it, she didn't feel that way anymore. The flatness had lifted at some point, and she hadn't even noticed, because she'd never had a name for it in the first place.

That's not a coincidence. That's how the brain works.

Your brain needed a concept before it could have an experience

This is the part I wish someone had taught me twenty years ago: naming isn't just poetic. It's neurological.

Your brain doesn't simply receive what's happening inside you—it predicts it, filters it, and files it, using whatever concepts it already has on hand. If you don't have a word for something, your brain has nowhere to put it. It becomes background noise. Static. The kind of thing you learn to call "fine" because fine is the closest available word, even when it isn't true.

The moment something gets a real name, your brain can finally recognize it when it shows up again. It stops being noise and starts being information. You can't move toward what you can't name—and you can't feel what your brain has no concept for.

That's what happened to Pam. The word didn't fix anything. It just let her see what had actually been happening to her, this whole time.

Where do you spend the word fine?

I don't think this is only Pam's story, or Ruth's, the woman at the center of my novel. I think most of us are fluent in fine long before we're fluent in what's actually true.

So here's the only question I'd ask you to sit with this week, the same one Ruth eventually has to ask herself:

What would it cost you to stop saying fine?

Not forever. Not to everyone. Just once, to someone safe, about something real.

You don't have to have the whole word yet. You just have to be willing to go looking for it.